This isn’t particularly deep analysis, more just aggregation. Here’s my take on the results, though, after some totally biased and ad-hoc tallying:
A total of seventy-five users responded. Convenience, scheduling conflicts, and other personal issues were by far the most common reasons not to attend, as a factor in almost half of the responses. Unfortunately there’s not much we can do about this, except possibly giving more thought to location when scheduling, and that seems unlikely to happen given the issues I’ve seen with finding space and time. Two people felt uncomfortable with an otherwise convenient meetup’s location, with a third having no personal complaints but describing complaints from others.
After that, a perception of the participants as too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward seems to be the most common complaint, with ten people citing one or more. A couple of these respondents attended no meetups and were presumably working from perceptions of the LW community at large, but most had. This seems to be a pivotal issue with our community’s perception, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I imagine many feel it’s a feature rather than a bug.
A lack of structure is a close third, at nine responses. Often this involved uncertainty over time and location, or scheduling difficulties thanks to inadequate information. Games and unstructured discussion seem to be seen as adding little value, with the latter in particular cited as allowing unproductive debate between a couple of participants to dominate meetups. Bad discussion norms were specifically mentioned as a factor in four responses. These are probably the most serious issues we can immediately do anything about: I’ve personally participated in both structured and unstructured meetups, and the difference is night and day. Establishing some best practices here would go a very long way.
Seven people felt that their meetups were unproductive, adding little value in terms of practical rationality or other useful skills; six complained of boredom. This is likely related to the complaints about structure; several people mentioned both.
Another six people felt intimidated by meetup participants or the LW community, most citing perceived intelligence or technical knowledge. Conversely, five felt that meetup participants were generally unimpressive (my notes say “not awesome enough”); most of these describe a hope for more accomplished peers, perhaps along the lines of Eliezer’s mandatory secret identities. I suspect this might be an oblique way of saying they’re too nerdy, as above.
Two complained of political differences, and two felt their meetup wasn’t diverse enough.
Finally, two respondents described harassing behavior from a participant or organizer.
Thanks for this summary! This is a very important thing for growing of the community.
I was thinking about whether being “too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward” is a bug or a feature, but it seems to me that we need to be more specific, to look into details. Some things in our community are inherently weird (unusual in the everyday discourse); debating artificial intelligence, for example. But some forms of social awkwardness (harassment, boredom, unproductive debates) can—and should—be fixed; I mean, not just for the PR purposes, but because that also is a part of “becoming stronger”. Let’s see how far towards pleasant interaction can we go without sacrificing other values (such as honesty). I guess we can—and should—improve here a lot.
Maybe it’s an issue of going meta at solving the wrong problem. If I want to have a group of people who talk about artificial intelligence, I must focus not only on the “artificial intelligence” part, but also on the “having a group of people” part. This is probably our blind spot, because the former feels like an academic subject, while the latter feels almost like an opposite to the academia (so we are even tempted to countersignal our sophistication by being bad a it). People can get Nobel price for being educated, but nobody gets a price for making an environment where the former are happy to meet, debate, learn, and discover. All winning comes from people, and yet supporting other people in their winning is somehow low-status (as in: you are unable to win on your own, therefore the best you can do is to support others). Please note that this is specifically an academic bias—in business, you can make a lot of money and status by creating stuff that other people need.
When we try to build the community, then “building the community” is the topic to focus on. Yeah, it can feel like making a community for the sake of making a community, which would be a lost purpose. But, some things are true for communities in general, because they are true for humans in general, and if we want to have a good community, we have to study that. Also, not everyone has to focus on this, but someone should—preferably more than one person, so they can talk and share ideas. If you want to have a meetup debating artificial intelligence (or whatever else), create a subgroup that focuses on the topic, and a subgroup which focuses on the community. Both are necessary.
Bringing a box of cookies to the AI debate meetup could be more important than bringing an article about the latest discovery in AI. (And bringing an article about the latest discovery in AI is still preferable to just talking without really learning.) No, we don’t want to get to the point where everyone brings cookies and no one debates LW topics—but I suspect that even this strawman example is closer to a healthy and productive community than where many of us are now.
We need to apply our rationality, and to specifically apply it at creating rationalist communities. Yes, it is difficult. That shouldn’t be a reason to avoid it, but a reason to focus on it. It is a problem to be solved. And it will not be solved by anyone other than us.
Let’s see how far towards pleasant interaction can we go without sacrificing other values (such as honesty).
I rather suspect—and this is me talking, not my interpretation of the survey data—that this already concedes too much. I’ve talked to LWers who appeared to be hung up on honesty to the point of kneecapping themselves socially: not just preferring a more explicit interaction style, but outright refusing to deal with people who partake in perfectly normal social untruths. These sorts of extremes don’t seem to be common, but insofar as they’re a problem in some segments of the community, they’re not going to be solved without at least a few concessions against existing values.
Properly exploring this would probably take a top-level post, but I think I can summarize by saying I agree with ChrisHallquist here.
This isn’t particularly deep analysis, more just aggregation. Here’s my take on the results, though, after some totally biased and ad-hoc tallying:
A total of seventy-five users responded. Convenience, scheduling conflicts, and other personal issues were by far the most common reasons not to attend, as a factor in almost half of the responses. Unfortunately there’s not much we can do about this, except possibly giving more thought to location when scheduling, and that seems unlikely to happen given the issues I’ve seen with finding space and time. Two people felt uncomfortable with an otherwise convenient meetup’s location, with a third having no personal complaints but describing complaints from others.
After that, a perception of the participants as too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward seems to be the most common complaint, with ten people citing one or more. A couple of these respondents attended no meetups and were presumably working from perceptions of the LW community at large, but most had. This seems to be a pivotal issue with our community’s perception, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I imagine many feel it’s a feature rather than a bug.
A lack of structure is a close third, at nine responses. Often this involved uncertainty over time and location, or scheduling difficulties thanks to inadequate information. Games and unstructured discussion seem to be seen as adding little value, with the latter in particular cited as allowing unproductive debate between a couple of participants to dominate meetups. Bad discussion norms were specifically mentioned as a factor in four responses. These are probably the most serious issues we can immediately do anything about: I’ve personally participated in both structured and unstructured meetups, and the difference is night and day. Establishing some best practices here would go a very long way.
Seven people felt that their meetups were unproductive, adding little value in terms of practical rationality or other useful skills; six complained of boredom. This is likely related to the complaints about structure; several people mentioned both.
Another six people felt intimidated by meetup participants or the LW community, most citing perceived intelligence or technical knowledge. Conversely, five felt that meetup participants were generally unimpressive (my notes say “not awesome enough”); most of these describe a hope for more accomplished peers, perhaps along the lines of Eliezer’s mandatory secret identities. I suspect this might be an oblique way of saying they’re too nerdy, as above.
Two complained of political differences, and two felt their meetup wasn’t diverse enough.
Finally, two respondents described harassing behavior from a participant or organizer.
Thanks for this summary! This is a very important thing for growing of the community.
I was thinking about whether being “too nerdy, weird, or socially awkward” is a bug or a feature, but it seems to me that we need to be more specific, to look into details. Some things in our community are inherently weird (unusual in the everyday discourse); debating artificial intelligence, for example. But some forms of social awkwardness (harassment, boredom, unproductive debates) can—and should—be fixed; I mean, not just for the PR purposes, but because that also is a part of “becoming stronger”. Let’s see how far towards pleasant interaction can we go without sacrificing other values (such as honesty). I guess we can—and should—improve here a lot.
Maybe it’s an issue of going meta at solving the wrong problem. If I want to have a group of people who talk about artificial intelligence, I must focus not only on the “artificial intelligence” part, but also on the “having a group of people” part. This is probably our blind spot, because the former feels like an academic subject, while the latter feels almost like an opposite to the academia (so we are even tempted to countersignal our sophistication by being bad a it). People can get Nobel price for being educated, but nobody gets a price for making an environment where the former are happy to meet, debate, learn, and discover. All winning comes from people, and yet supporting other people in their winning is somehow low-status (as in: you are unable to win on your own, therefore the best you can do is to support others). Please note that this is specifically an academic bias—in business, you can make a lot of money and status by creating stuff that other people need.
When we try to build the community, then “building the community” is the topic to focus on. Yeah, it can feel like making a community for the sake of making a community, which would be a lost purpose. But, some things are true for communities in general, because they are true for humans in general, and if we want to have a good community, we have to study that. Also, not everyone has to focus on this, but someone should—preferably more than one person, so they can talk and share ideas. If you want to have a meetup debating artificial intelligence (or whatever else), create a subgroup that focuses on the topic, and a subgroup which focuses on the community. Both are necessary.
Bringing a box of cookies to the AI debate meetup could be more important than bringing an article about the latest discovery in AI. (And bringing an article about the latest discovery in AI is still preferable to just talking without really learning.) No, we don’t want to get to the point where everyone brings cookies and no one debates LW topics—but I suspect that even this strawman example is closer to a healthy and productive community than where many of us are now.
We need to apply our rationality, and to specifically apply it at creating rationalist communities. Yes, it is difficult. That shouldn’t be a reason to avoid it, but a reason to focus on it. It is a problem to be solved. And it will not be solved by anyone other than us.
I rather suspect—and this is me talking, not my interpretation of the survey data—that this already concedes too much. I’ve talked to LWers who appeared to be hung up on honesty to the point of kneecapping themselves socially: not just preferring a more explicit interaction style, but outright refusing to deal with people who partake in perfectly normal social untruths. These sorts of extremes don’t seem to be common, but insofar as they’re a problem in some segments of the community, they’re not going to be solved without at least a few concessions against existing values.
Properly exploring this would probably take a top-level post, but I think I can summarize by saying I agree with ChrisHallquist here.
Thank you! Honestly, this is pretty much exactly what I was hoping for—if you were to post this to main, I would consider my duty fulfilled.
Thanks. It lacks polish right now, but I’ll see if I can pretty it up a bit and post it to Main later.